News

2025-05: GNU Taler v1.0 released

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v1.0.

This release is a special milestone, as with it we are ready to launch our operation in Switzerland. Starting today, Taler Operations AG is legally operating the GNU Taler payment system in Swiss Francs open to individuals and businesses in Switzerland. We consider this a public beta, primarily because at this point there are no shops accepting the payment system. While a few rough edges remain, we believe at this point operating the system is legal and users assets are safe. We are also committed to ensuring backwards compatibility of every future release to the previous release.
We encourage business owners and developers in Switzerland to set to work on accepting GNU Taler. We have prepared various tutorials on how to get started. We encourage you to use the Integrator Community Hub to receive community support.

About GNU Taler

GNU Taler is a Free Software payment system that preserves the privacy of payers while ensuring that income is visible to authorities. Regulated payment service providers use the Taler protocol to issue digital cash denominated in a fiat currency. The digital cash tokens are stored in electronic wallets under the full control of its respective owner. The payment service provider has an escrow bank account holding the equivalent of all digital cash in circulation.
Merchants redeeming digital cash receive aggregate transactions over the respective amount into their regular bank account. Digital cash transactions happen basically instantly, and must be performed online to prevent double-spending.
Support exists for offline points-of-sales to accept transactions where only the customer is online. GNU Taler is scalable and technologically suitable for regional currencies (such as eNetzbon), commercial deployments (such as Taler Operations AG) or central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Changes in GNU Taler v1.0

For GNU Taler v1.0 we addressed over 200 individual issues. Our bug tracker has the full list. Notable changes include:

  • NEW: Withdrawing is now authorized with a single signature instead of one per coin (performance improvement)
  • NEW: Refresh uses deterministic signatures instead of Diffie-Hellman (post-quantum readiness)
  • NEW: Endpoints for age-restricted withdraw, regular withdraw and refresh were unified (simplified design)
  • NEW: Added support for per-recipient statistics in the exchange for anomaly detection (for anti-money laundering)
  • NEW: 2-step operations that yield fresh coins are now idempotent even if denomination keys are rotated in between (correctness)
  • NEW: Addressed most issues found in external security audit of the iOS wallet (privacy)
  • NEW: Translation of Terms of service and Privacy policy in German, English and French complete
  • Various minor bugfixes, user experience and documentation improvements

Our work is co-funded by the European Commission and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) as part of the NGI TALER project.

Download links

The wallets have their own download site here. The exchange, merchant backend, sync and bank components are distributed via the GNU FTP mirrors.

You must first install GNUnet v0.24.1 or the current Git master to compile GNU Taler 1.0 from source.